Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/211

 subtle sophistry—the charm! was the mysterious, individual, essential woman. There was indeed an element in the glamour working so well for his friend that he was obliged fairly to allow for, but which he forbore to linger upon; the rather important attraction, namely, of reciprocity. As to the girl's being herself in love, and showing it, and commending herself by the indubitable tribute, this was a side of the matter from which he averted his head for delicacy, as he conceived, but for a delicacy not pleasantly painless. He would n't for the world have asked himself—and he quite noted it—how "far" Mary had gone; gone toward creating Roderick's flattered state by showing him first that she was smitten. He confined himself only to judging that the young man was not irresistibly flattered now, and to feeling that Miss Garland was as living a presence in his own world as she had been five days after he left her. He drifted, under these deep discretions indeed, nearer and nearer to the conviction that at just that crisis any other girl would have answered Roderick's supposedly sentimental needs as well. Any other woman verily would do so still! Roderick had confessed as much to him at Geneva in saying that he had been taking at Baden-Baden the measure of his susceptibility.

His extraordinary success in modelling the bust of the beautiful Miss Light was pertinent evidence of the quantity of consciousness of the great feminine fact always at his service for application and discrimination. She sat to him repeatedly for a fortnight, and the work was rapidly finished. On one of the last 177